Good morning and welcome to this week’s Friday Brief.
We’re in party conference season and the MTA has been representing our members at both Labour and Conservative events. Read the MTA’s Head of External Affairs take on proceedings in the story bellow. Understanding what is going on in the manufacturing economy in real-time is a vital tool in our kit when talking to opinion formers. That’s why the Business Survey is so important to us – so please take a few minutes to fill it in below.
The Talent Retention Solution, is a free-of-charge online tool that helps companies to recruit Engineers. MTA has been a supporter of the scheme ever since its inception and it has helped place thousands of engineers into new roles within the industry. If you’re looking for talent to bring into your business, we’d recommend taking a look at the story below and considering TRS for your employee search.
Staying with recruitment, a new post has just been published on the ESFA Digital blog “New feedback feature for the Apprenticeship Service”, take a look and see if you can contribute some feedback too.
We have a short Questionnaire on the Machinery Directive, cybersecurity and AI that we would like members to contribute too. The aim of the questionnaire is to allow us to develop a common position on some issues (e.g. how to deal with cybersecurity at a European level) and gather some relevant examples we could use when discussing the review of the Directive with the Commission.
Lloyds Bank this week announced that it is investing a further £5 million to fund its sponsorship of the Advanced Manufacturing Training Centre (AMTC), doubling its original commitment and bringing total funding to £10 million over 10 years. We’d like to pay tribute to the manufacturing team at Lloyds who have supported this fantastic Centre and made manufacturing career opportunities open to some brilliant young people.
The main economic headlines this week were from the PMI data which showed an acceleration in activity for the UK manufacturing sector, but a further deceleration for the Euro-zone; these terms are chosen carefully as the levels of both the UK and the Euro-zone PMI are still well into positive territory which indicates that manufacturing activity is still growing. There was a mix of trends elsewhere in the world with the main news probably the return to growth in South Korea for the first time since February (at 51.3) balanced somewhat by a very low PMI reading (42.7) for Turkey. Publication of the UK National Accounts showed a downward revision to the annualised rate of growth for the UK economy as a result of slower growth at the start of 2018 - the Q2 figure was unchanged at +0.4%, but the annualised rate was down to +1.2%. Alongside this, we have the detailed investment figures that show that total manufacturing capital spending and the sub-set for Engineering industries were lower than both the previous quarter and the equivalent quarter in 2017, although in both cases the 4-quarter rolling trend was positive. The CBI Industrial Trends Survey and the European Commission’s Economic Sentiment Index both point to a slow-down in the period to September, although both series are still in a healthy position in historical terms. The US market for manufacturing technology and for cutting tools continues to grow at a strong pace. Finally this month, we have the latest data set for the Contract Price Adjustment Service (CPA) from BEAMA that we subscribe to on behalf of MTA members.
That’s all for this week, we’ll be back next Friday with more industry news, until then have a great weekend from everyone at the MTA.
